Contents

Good day – my name is Brett Legree. I am an engineer and I work in the Canadian nuclear industry – specifically, I am a nuclear facility site inspector and I work for the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, which is Canada’s nuclear regulatory organization. We help ensure the continued safe operation of nuclear companies. That is what I do from 9 to 5.

Looking ahead to this new year, “I wish and expect that the world will discover FLOSS, particularly Debian GNU/Linux, to be the rich and efficient software system I have been using for years,” said blogger Robert Pogson. “It is as different as night and day from that other OS, with all its restrictions and fragility.”

This post has been boiling in the back of my brain for quite some time. It’s been one of those that I was never completely sure of, until 2011 saw the influx of emails coming in saying how out of touch the Linux desktop designers were with both reality and the end user. From my perspective, it’s a bit strong of a sentiment; but the driving force behind the idea is dead on. After giving this train of thought plenty of time to derail, I decided it was finally time to fully address what I think is actually becoming an issue with the Linux desktop and how other platforms manage to avoid the problem. Although there is no big science behind my conclusions, this issue is something near and dear to me.

Desktop

At BETT in the HP booth (Stand J40, Upper Level) in London, England from January 11 – 14, Userful, the world leader in Linux desktop virtualization, will be demonstrating the next generation of their Userful MultiSeat™ solution.

GNOME Desktop

Cinnamon is a GNOME Shell fork created by Clement Lefebvre, the Linux Mint founder, which tries to offer a layout similar to GNOME 2: a bottom panel with launchers, GNOME2-like systray and notifications and more.

Arch Linux has a cult following, and there is a price to pay too – it is one of those operating systems which requires its users to be well versed with the UNIX-like system. You build everything from scratch. There are quite a lot of benefits of using such a system. But, it also means that Arch Linux is not for mere mortals like me. I did install Arch once, reading a manual written by a Muktware author, but then moved back to my secure cocoon. I continue to dream of using Arch one day. Chakra brings me closer to realizing that dream. I may not have compiled the OS for my hardware and gone through the interesting installation process but through Chakra I do get to experience all the goodies of Arch without sweating too much.

New Releases

Debian Family

When I started a poll about a month ago, I did not know what the outcome would be. I mean the “Best XFCE-based distribution” poll. I had a vague vision that Xubuntu would come out somewhere near the top not only because *buntu is the most popular distribution family, but also because it is a really good distribution on its own.
But I had no idea which system would share the leadership with Xubuntu. All the candidates were actually decent Operating Systems, each with points pro and con.

Extremadura isn’t the only public administration to discontinue the development of a custom Linux distribution. In May 2011, the German government said that among the reasons for migrating the German Foreign Office’s Linux systems back to Windows were the high maintenance costs of the custom Linux distribution.

Derivatives

David Tavares, the French developer behind the jaw-dropping Pear OS Linux operating system is proud to announce today, January 3rd, the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Alpha version of Pear OS Linux Debian Edition.

The developers of the Debian-based aptosid, formerly known as Sidux, have released version 2011-03 of the distribution. As with the Debian Sid tree (as of 2011-12-31) it is based on, aptosid 2011-03 comes with the 3.1.6 Linux kernel and either the KDE 4.6.5 or Xfce 4.8 desktop environments. With the new kernel comes more support for hardware including various USB Wi-Fi sticks with Atheros chipsets and some Broadcom wireless cards.

Canonical/Ubuntu

I am becoming more and more convinced that the real thread to free software (and I am talking here about software released under a free license, not software that you can download and use for free) is contempt. Proprietary software is a competitor, but not a real threat. Proprietary software cannot really kill free software: no matter how many law suits you start, how many patents you file, how many pre-installed versions of Windows you have, common sense will always win. Contempt, however, the the real danger.

Like most computer enthusiasts, I find myself seeking out Linux distributions that offer a bleeding edge experience. That said, I’m also careful not to place bleeding edge operating systems onto a desktop machine I rely on for daily use.

Phones

Android

Social media has taken the world by storm. We have witnessed three major decision changed in the last two weeks, thanks to the power of social media. First one was Go Daddy’s decision to ‘not support’ SOPA, after the conscious users decided to transfer domains to other providers and created an online ‘revolt’ against Go Daddy. Second instance was of Verizon where the company was forced to roll back the $2 charge for online payment which was more of an extortion. The third change is Asus’ stand on locking the bootloader of Transformer Prime.

The holiday shopping season appears to have been very good indeed for Android, with Google claiming that 3.7 million Android devices were activated during the period. Meanwhile, Flurry Analytics reported that Android and iOS activations on Christmas Day soared to 6.8 million, and ComScore announced yet another boost for Android in its Nov. 2011 U.S. smartphone report.

I have owned a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (Wi-Fi only) and used it excessively nearly every day since I found it on sale at Staples last summer. To be completely honest, it has been the best tablet I’ve owned to date (and I’ve owned quite a few). Battery life is great, the display (in comparison with similar tablets) is wonderful, and it has given me minimal trouble when it comes to performance.

IBF Programs has created an app called ‘Stream for Android’ which brings most of the Steam features to Android. Caveat: It’s not an official Steam App. What is basically does is lets you check your Steam’s public profile.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

New year, new pricing strategy? We just got word that Sony’s cut the price of its 9.4-inch Tablet S by $100, so that it now starts at $400 for the 16GB model, and $500 for the 32GB flavor. The move follows a temporary $50 price cut, which Sony announced on December 15th and said would last through the end of the year.

The line up of names listed in the handset vendor rankings looks very different now to how it did a few years ago and may yet change more, with Linux-based operating systems lowering the cost of entry to new players. Ruslan Kogan, founder and CEO of Australian electronic manufacturer Kogan Technolgies and Australia’s richest person under 30, gives his thoughts on the market as the company prepares to enter the fray with a £119 Android tablet.

The Blender Foundation has started a new “Open Movie” project called “Mango”, and this one is of particular interest to me for Lunatics, because of the technical goal: motion tracking. Motion tracking is principally about putting animated 3D objects into real footage so that it matches the background “plate” (i.e. the original footage).

What happened? Starting with the release of the first open-source Fruit in mid-2004, and continuing with the release of subsequent versions of Fruit, open-source engine Stockfish, and especially the release of reverse-engineered Rybka derivatives, highly detailed recipes for building strong, modern chess engines have been in the public domain. Fledgling chess programmers as well as programming veterans have not failed to take notice and the state of the art has advanced rapidly. As a result of this spread of knowledge new programs receive a tremendous performance boost and become “fast climbers”.

Over the holidays, noted blogger Cory Doctorow delivered a keynote at the 28th Chaos Communication Congress in which he warned that one of the biggest problems on the technology scene is that control over our computing devices is about to be taken from us. There is a video of the address, called The Coming War on General Computing, available on YouTube. Doctorow warns that the copyright wars are only the beginning of a much bigger set of issues having to do with how much we control our own devices. The address has already drawn much reaction from the open source community, and is, in some ways, a defense of open source principles.

For those who became more interested in the PandaBoard ES after it was benchmarked on Phoronix last week, here’s some details about the Distributed Codec Engine found on this OMAP4 platform from Texas Instruments.

For providing hardware accelerated codec support there is the Codec Engine for modern Texas Instruments ARM platforms. “Codec Engine (CE) is a framework that enables applications to easily instantiate and work with XDM codecs and algorithms using a common API.”

Events

The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) will organize a two-day workshop on ‘Educational Resource Planning’ (EdRP) on January 7, 2012 and January 8, 2012. It is a collaborative project led by the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT-K).

Web Browsers

For the best part of the past decade I’ve been writing about web browsers. In fact it goes back further than that, all the way to the early 1990′s, when the Mosaic browser first opened my eyes to the potential of the World Wide Web.

Chrome

Mozilla

So, as Luis Villa announced on a list, Mozilla Public License v. 2.0 has just been published. It’s actually an interesting evolution. (Indeed, the overall evolution of open licenses bears scrutiny, as they–the licenses–are being taken as seriously as any other legal instrument.)

SaaS

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

It’s a new year, and LibreOffice — the office productivity suite forked from OpenOffice.org — is the new face of open source productivity software. Or is it? And more importantly, will it remain so as OpenOffice is reborn under the Apache Foundation? Here are some thoughts on what to expect on this front in 2012.

For those who don’t know the back story: In 2010, Oracle acquired Sun, which owned the OpenOffice.org project at the time. Concerned that Oracle might restrict or close the OpenOffice code, or sell the product for money, several groups formed the Document Foundation and forked OO into LibreOffice, an independent endeavor. Since then, most leading desktop Linux distributions have replaced OpenOffice with LibreOffice as their default office productivity suite.

Business

Semi-Open Source

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Late last year, president Obama signed a law that makes it possible to indefinitely detain terrorist suspects without any form of trial or due process. Peaceful protesters in Occupy movements all over the world have been labelled as terrorists by the authorities. Initiatives like SOPA promote diligent monitoring of communication channels. Thirty years ago, when Richard Stallman launched the GNU project, and during the three decades that followed, his sometimes extreme views and peculiar antics were ridiculed and disregarded as paranoia – but here we are, 2012, and his once paranoid what-ifs have become reality.
Up until relatively recently, it’s been easy to dismiss Richard Stallman as a paranoid fanatic, someone who lost touch with reality long ago. A sort of perpetual computer hippie, the perfect personification of the archetype of the unworldly basement-dwelling computer nerd. His beard, his hair, his outfits – in our visual world, it’s simply too easy to dismiss him.
His views have always been extreme. His only computer is a Lemote Yeelong netbook, because it’s the only computer which uses only Free software – no firmware blobs, no proprietary BIOS; it’s all Free. He also refuses to own a mobile phone, because they’re too easy to track; until there’s a mobile phone equivalent of the Yeelong, Stallman doesn’t want one. Generally, all software should be Free. Or, as the Free Software Foundation puts it:

As our society grows more dependent on computers, the software we run is of critical importance to securing the future of a free society. Free software is about having control over the technology we use in our homes, schools and businesses, where computers work for our individual and communal benefit, not for proprietary software companies or governments who might seek to restrict and monitor us.

I, too, disregarded Stallman as way too extreme. Free software to combat controlling and spying governments? Evil corporations out to take over the world? Software as a tool to monitor private communication channels? Right. Surely, Free and open source software is important, and I choose it whenever functional equivalence with proprietary solutions is reached, but that Stallman/FSF nonsense is way out there.
But here we are, at the start of 2012. Obama signed the NDAA for 2012, making it possible for American citizens to be detained indefinitely without any form of trial or due process, only because they are terrorist suspects.

In my last column, I suggested that one of the best things that Mozilla could do in order to promote the Open Web and openness in general would be to support the battle for online freedom in more general ways. That’s something it has already started doing, notably in trying to halt the passage of the awful Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that is currently grinding through the US legislative process.

Project Releases

After nearly four years of development, the Scribus development team has released version 1.4.0 of its open source desktop publishing (DTP) application. The major change in the 1.4.0 is the switch to the Qt4 framework, updating the application from its previous use of Qt3. The developers say the change itself was quick, but fine tuning and making use of new features of the application framework took “quite some time”. The result is that Scribus is now at the same level of reliability on all its supported platforms.

The Clementine developers have published version 1.0 of their open source music player. The cross-platform application is designed to be fast and easy-to-use, and was inspired by version 1.4 of Amarok (the current release is Amarok 2.5). With Clementine, users can listen to their local music library or to online radio stations; it can be used to transcode music into MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, FLAC and AAC files.

Trelby 2.0, an open source screenplay editor, has been launched by developers Anil Gulecha and Osku Salerma. Trelby is a rebranding of Blyte, an application written by Salerma in 2003 and sold until 2006; poor sales led to Salerma open sourcing the application in the hope that a community would form around it, but this did not happen. Five years later, in late 2011, Gulecha discovered the application while searching for a better screenplay editor than celtx. He began creating improvements to Blyte and this inspired Salerma to return to work on the application. Together they have renamed the application, refreshed the code, created a new web site and are now trying to build a community around developing the application though they admit “the intersection of software developers and screenwriters is tiny”.

Public Services/Government

According to a computing.co.uk article entitled Open Source: The government’s commitment so far, most of the IT technology used in the UK government is still proprietary and comes from single vendors.

Open source adoption by government agencies in the UK is progressing, but is still being hindered by a focus on “free as in gratis.” Decisions based on cost-of-acquisition alone ignore the other real and more important values offered by open source, which are derived from “free as in freedom.”

Openness/Sharing

Magic tricks depend on secrecy. So it might seem counterintuitive that Marco Tempest — a Swiss-born magician living in New York — has gone open-source. He reveals his methods, talks to his audiences online and asks for feedback. “If someone has a good idea, I put it in my show and give credit,” says Tempest, 46.

On Monday, I wrote about how the lead developer of an open-source project – Adblock Plus – had created a start-up to manage the project. As part of a new business plan, the software, which has long been known for blocking ads, would no longer block what it calls “acceptable ads.” (These ads will not be flashy or slow down the browsing experience.)

Programming

The Gambas developers published version 3.0 of their BASIC development environment for Linux just before the new year was about to begin in the US. By their own admission, they made it just in time, as they had promised this version would be released in 2011. Gambas allows users to write applications in an extended version of BASIC that can make use of Qt4 or GTK+ GUIs, communicate over D-Bus, drive OpenGL, and access databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite.

Three men are currently seeking the presidential nomination of the Reform Party of the United States of America: small business owner Andre Barnett, Earth Intelligence Network CEO Robert Steele, and former college football coach Robby Wells. Wikinews reached out to these candidates and asked each of them five questions about their campaigns. There were no space limits placed on the responses, and no candidate was exposed to another’s responses before making their own. The answers are posted below in unedited form for comparison of the candidates.

Armin Bauer, one of the three German hobbyists involved in the HGG, said at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin that the system involved a reversal of the standard GPS technique. The scheme was announced at the event, which is Europe’s largest hacker conference.

Quite the troll post on Slashdot over the Holiday weekend, sniveling about wanting BASIC on the mobile phone platform.

BASIC advocates seem to come back annually on Slashdot like a herpes outbreak. Last year it was somebody advocating BASIC as a teaching language again. Touting BASIC as a way to teach “the joy of programming” is like recommending a night in a whorehouse as a way to teach young men “the joy of marriage”.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

I feel motivated today to write about global markets, and especially the lingering fear that’s sure to carry over from 2011 to 2012. The last 18 months have supplied historians with every reason to believe that a replay of the 2008 financial crisis was about to unfold. The difference being that the private sector debt crisis which triggered 2008′s terrible domino event has now been transposed, into a similar risk in sovereign debt. Especially the sovereign debt of peripheral Europe. As a student of macroeconomics, and as one who observes the procession of market psychology—when markets slowly move from the comfort of sleep to the Ker-Pow! of recognition—I am strangely in the position of thinking the following, mildly heretical thought: tail risk in global markets is now much, much lower than most anticipate. If that’s true, certain asset classes are going to make very large, very surprising moves in 2012.

Finance

Have a column on Iowa coming soon, but first, a quick but absurd note from the world of high finance.

It seems Jim O’Neill, the head of Goldman’s Asset Management department, is predicting that the United States stock market may go up “15 to 20 percent.” O’Neill apparently believes Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve will resort to another round of money-printing, and finally green-light the long-awaited “Qe3,” or third round of “Quantitative Easing.”

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

Recently, a group of farmers and neighbors in Salmon Valley, near Prince George, British Columbia, successfully blockaded Wright Creek Road and turned back a truck full of sewage sludge headed for a 117 acre parcel of farm land contracted as a dump site by the City of Prince George. One neighbor brought a snow mobile towing a portable fire pit on a sled so that they were able to keep warm while they blocked the road. As of this writing, the trucks have not returned.

The lunacy of the EPO with its patent maximalism will likely go unchecked (and uncorrected) if Battistelli gets his way and turns the EPO into another SIPO (Croatian in the human rights sense and Chinese in the quality sense)

Another long installment in a multi-part series about UPC at times of post-truth Battistelli-led EPO, which pays the media to repeat the lies and pretend that the UPC is inevitable so as to compel politicians to welcome it regardless of desirability and practicability

Implementing yet more of his terrible ideas and so-called 'reforms', Battistelli seems to be racing to the bottom of everything (patent quality, staff experience, labour rights, working conditions, access to justice etc.)

"Good for trolls" is a good way to sum up the Unitary Patent, which would give litigators plenty of business (defendants and plaintiffs, plus commissions on high claims of damages) if it ever became a reality

Microsoft's continued fascination with and participation in the effort to undermine Alice so as to make software patents, which the company uses to blackmail GNU/Linux vendors, widely acceptable and applicable again